All of these historical surpluses—the afterlives of slavery, of the deranged presidency, and of the threat of terrorism as permission to set aside legal and democratic rights—have raised the stakes in the present struggle. This mass of unresolved stuff is being forced toward some kind of resolution. That resolution can come in only one of two ways. What has come to the surface can be repressed again—but that repression will have to be enforced by methods that will also dismantle democracy. Trump’s boast that he can do whatever he wants will have to be institutionalized, made fully operational, and imposed by state violence. Or there will be a transformative wave of change. All of this unfinished business has made the United States semidemocratic, a half-and-half world in which ideals of equality, political accountability, and the rule of law exist alongside practices that make a daily mockery of those ideals. This half-life is ending—either the outward show of democracy is finished and authoritarianism triumphs, or the long-denied substance becomes real. The unconsumed past will either be faced and dealt with, or it will consume the American republic.
Fintan O'Toole, NYRB 6/12/20
I think it's true. This will be resolved one way or the other. In the next six months we will learn what kind of country we really have. Even if Joe Biden wins, he won't be allowed to just let things return to the status quo ante Trump.
According to Michael Tomasky, even Biden seems to get this:
Biden, by most accounts, has been a different man since the pandemic hit. Last year, he sometimes spoke of his presidency as a return to a pre-Trump era. Now, with unemployment nearing 15 percent and calls for change from protesters becoming more urgent—and with the crisis starkly laying bare the economic precarity in which so many Americans were living even before the virus hit—he sees himself in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, a leader who would rise to the vast challenge history has thrust upon him and introduce sweeping change. The change in Biden has sometimes been overstated. But it is real, and it makes the prospect of a Biden presidency (provided it’s combined with Democratic capture of the Senate) far more intriguing than it was just two months ago.”
Biden is no FDR, but he will assemble a team of people who will push him, and that might be good enough.
I'm more optimistic now than I've been in a while. I'm beginning to see Trump as playing an important role in bringing us to a transformative moment. He is the reductio ad absurdum of the unhinged Libertarianism-cum-culture-war that has possessed the country since Reagan. We needed Trump to parade before us in all his delusional malignity to understand the insanity we've been living with and accepting as more or less normal for the last forty years.
We'll find out in November whether my optimism is delusional.